Meet Me At The Bus Shelter

Flashback

The swishes of material and the clangs and clatters of coat hangers upon clothing racks disturbed the otherwise deafening silence of the small fashion store. Jennifer stood silently in the back corner, her head down, shuffling through out dated dresses to throw onto the clearance pile. After waking from yet another flashback nightmare of the day her life changed for the worst she abruptly realised she had to go to work. Spending a day working in a stuffy, high profile fashion store definitely wasn’t her idea of a suitable past time.

“Do you have this dress in a size eight?”

Jennifer jumped and spun around; she had not even heard the middle-aged woman creep up behind her.

“Uh…”

“Well do you? The service these days.” The pompous woman huffed, her thin nostrils flaring. Jennifer rolled her eyes and took the dress out of the woman’s hand. It was a rose pink chiffon number that looked like it would have been trendy in the 1920’s. She strolled over to the storage room and looked through the dress sizes and groaned when she couldn’t find an eight. She reluctantly walked back to the woman; her tight bun pulling her wrinkles taught and pristine, pinstriped business suit just glowered with authority. Jennifer cringed as she conveyed the bad news to the woman. 

“I am so sorry ma’am but we don’t have this dress in an eight, we only have sixes, tens and fourteens.”

The woman pursed her lips and snatched the dress right from Jennifer’s hands.

“Well maybe if you had spent the equivalent amount of time looking for my dress as you did gawking then there would be no problem!”

Jennifer couldn’t help but gape as the rude woman threw the dress onto the mauve carpet and stormed out. Picking up the dress and hanging in back in its place Jennifer sighed. Every single day she had to endure people like this walking over her like a ratty old doormat. Quite suddenly, the front door bell chimed and Jennifer raised her head in alert; a repeat performance of what just happened would not be good for her job.

The good thing was that it was her manager, not some I’m-so-superior rich person… The bad thing was he didn’t look happy, and he was headed in her direction.

“I hate my life.” Jennifer whispered just under her breath before Rico; Her manager could talk.

“We need to talk. “ He stated flatly, a manicured hand on the hip of his yellow skinny jeans.

“What have I done now?” Jen asked with genuine curiosity. According to her she had been the ideal employee since she had begun working here.

“On my way here I happened to run into a quite flustered woman.” He answered.

“When I most politely asked if she was okay she broke down into tears because ‘the girl with the dark blue beanie’ refused to get a dress in her size!”

Jennifer could not believe it.

“You have got to be kidding me!” She groaned in utter disbelief.

“Jen this is ridiculous! Your work ethic has dropped drastically in the last few months. I know it was hard…” He trailed off at the glazing over of Jen’s eyes. 

“But you can’t take it out on innocent customers.”

Jen shook her head. She literally could not believe what she was hearing. Violently shoving a dress onto the rack she retaliated.

“You are so freaking clueless Rico!” She laughed in an almost maniacal way.

“You are literally too gay to see how awful the women that buy from this shop are! That lady just chucked a tantrum because there were no I repeat no dresses in her stupid size eight and I will not be accused of some false bullsh-…”